The Big Whale that transferred 850,000 BTC is Coinbase

In the past week, many people have noticed that a big whale suddenly transferred nearly 850,000 BTCs, which are worth billions of dollars based on current prices.

On last Tuesday, the 66,452 BTC in the address 1PnMfRF2enSZnR6JSexxBHuQnxG8Vo5FVK was directly transferred to another address, and then evenly distributed to 100 addresses, each containing 662.52 BTC, and the other address received 200 BTC.

According to BitInfoCharts, this address was once the ninth bitcoin address.

In addition, another whale address (containing 66,379 BTC) began to split in the same way and was distributed to another 101 addresses.

A few days later, we found that some people put a lot of bitcoin into 107 addresses containing 8,000 BTC, and the total amount of funds involved reached 107 * 8000 = 856,000 BTC.

Some analysts said that these bitcoins belong to the fee.org website because some of the addresses involved are marked by bitinfochart for the fee.org wallet address, but in fact this analysis is unrealistic. The reality is provided by FEE.org. The BTC donation address is 15B8iGCndPacYsvLqrTNL4LqjHo7JX752h. It has only received 2.21485713 BTC so far, and it was sent out immediately after receiving it.

In fact, at the end of November, Coinbase posted an announcement in its official blog, which mentioned:

“In the next seven days, Coinbase will perform regular maintenance on our platform, which may result in the movement of all blockchains (assets) supported by Coinbase. These activities are controlled and closely monitored, with the aim of Provide better security for our customers…”

The above-mentioned large amount of BTC transfer occurred at exactly the time between December 1 and December 6, just in line with the time points mentioned in the Coinbase announcement.
Together with the information of more than 13 million addresses associated with these transactions, it also coincides with the number of Coinbase addresses.

The above evidence is enough to show that the 856,000 BTC belongs to the Coinbase platform and its users.

So why does Coinbase have to do such a big move?

Personal guess, in the current bear market, Bitcoin transaction costs are very low, which can be said to be a good time to organize, in addition, the funds are transferred from the legacy address to the SegWit “bc1” address, which can effectively reduce the transaction cost. Redistributing wallets can spread the risk of a single point of failure, a common financial network security strategy.

What the author wants to say is that for large bitcoin transfers, we should not over-interpret them. In fact, many bitcoin transfers in history have been proved to be the exchange’s wallet.